Rescued from obscurity

The latest from the Flamin' Groovies and Puerto Muerto

Was there ever a phrase more
redolent of rock than “shake some action”? In the
annals of horndog eloquence, it’s up there with “Who
put the bomp in the bompalompalomp?” and “Tutti frutti
oh rootie” — pure Dionysian nonsense, the urgent
articulation of the inarticulate speech of the groin. Besides being
a killer command (senseless but kind of dirty, like all of the best
rockist imperatives), it’s the title track of the
Flamin’ Groovies’ fourth and finest album, which, alas,
you probably haven’t heard. Luckily, it’s not too late,
thanks to the fine folks at DBK Works, who just rescued the San
Francisco quintet’s masterpiece from obscurity. Deftly
remastered and repackaged with extensive liner notes, Shake Some Action
represents America’s greatest cult band at its apex. Record
geeks and eBay speculators be damned: It’s high time that the
masses get a piece of this Action.

In 1976, when it was originally released, Shake Some Action
seemed like a relic of a time that never quite was, a unique alloy
of Swinging London-era Merseybeat, grimy R&B, and ringing
Rickenbacker baroque-folk. While their more successful West Coast
peers were dropping acid and noodling with Indians, the Groovies
were communing with their inner adolescents, reveling in the
dynamic rock & roll that inspired them a decade earlier. In
spirit, it wasn’t unlike what their labelmates the Ramones
were doing, but instead of fighting hippie excess with speed,
volume, and a few choice barre chords, the Groovies embraced
melody, economy, and reverb-kissed riffs. Recorded in Wales with
Dave Edmunds, whose bass-centric, cunningly equalized,
quasi-Spectorian production confers a shivery glamour on the
proceedings, Shake Some Action combines all the best attributes of
mid-’60s rock without sounding like mere pastiche. From the
magnificent flanged guitar hook of the title track to the wistful
harmonies of “You Tore Me Down,” the measured melodrama
of “Teenage Confidential,” the
remorseless throb of “I Can’t Hide,” and the giddy
hypergospel of “She Said Yeah,” every detail is rock &
roll perfection, thrilling proof that great music carries no expiration
date.

Puerto MuertoSongs of Muerto County
(Fire)

If you never noticed the original
soundtrack to the original Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, don’t
blame yourself. Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell’s ambient-noise
score was unobtrusive to the point of anonymity, imparting a
subliminal sense of unease without drawing attention to itself. In
the vacuum, Puerto Muerto’s Tim Kelley and Christa Meyer saw
an opportunity. The Chicago-based spouses took it upon themselves
to create new music for the 1974 horror classic, billing it, rather
cheekily, as the “lost soundtrack” and performing it in
movie theaters as the film rolled behind them.

Conceived more as a companion piece than as a
conventional score, the dozen tracks of Songs of Muerto County
don’t elucidate the grim saga of Leatherface and his hippie
prey, and they don’t synch up with the film in the way that
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the
Moon supposedly does with The Wizard of Oz.
Kelley and Meyer’s lyrics don’t explicitly address the
movie’s themes of cannibalism, human taxidermy, and the
wanton misuse of power tools; instead, Muerto
County evokes a mood and more than a
little cognitive dissonance, providing eerily beautiful
counterpoint through warped spaghetti-Western studies, fusty parlor
waltzes, ragged roadhouse stomps, and banjo-and-violin ballads.
Consisting of full-fledged songs and incidental fragments, Puerto
Muerto’s fourth CD dovetails nicely with the duo’s
death-dominated oeuvre (previous album titles include Your Bloated Corpse Has Washed Ashore and See You in Hell), which is to say that it’s gorgeous and
morbid in equal measure, what some might call “gothic”
if the black-lipstick crowd hadn’t sucked all the subtlety
out of the term.